Broad Reach Engineering announces the successful launch and full functional check out of the IGOR GPS receiver onboard the German TerraSAR-X mission. Launched on a Dnepr rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the TerraSAR-X spacecraft was successfully deployed in its mission orbit of 514 km at 98 deg inclination.
The IGOR GPS receiver was declared operational on 6/30/2007. The GPS receiver is used on TerraSAR-X to provide high accuracy position and velocity information for image collocation. In addition, the unit is used as a radio occultation sensor, which provides approximately 500 daily measurements of atmospheric property profiles, ranging from the surface to the upper Ionosphere.
The IGOR GPS receiver is a dual frequency, dual redundant, 48 channel space qualified GPS receiver for precision orbit determination and radio occultation science. Based on the JPL BlackJack design, the receiver provides real-time position solutions with accuracies of 3 meters or better. Laser ranging validations by DLR show post processed orbit positioning to be from 2 to 5 centimeters.
The TerraSAR-X receiver joins 7 other similar IGOR GPS receivers currently on orbit, one each on the 6 COSMIC (April of 2006) spacecraft and one on TacSat-2 (launched in December 2006) for a current running total of over 10 years of on-orbit success. Two additional receivers will be launched in the near future on the German Tandem-X mission and the Korean KOMPSAT-5 satellite.
